The Card Catalog

The days are growing longer, and publishers are sending boxes and boxes of new books that are coming in the fall! Since I don’t want to think about cold weather coming back, lets just focus on all the new books, shall we?

I’ve read more than 150 books so far this year and I’m maintaining my 50% by or about POC goal. This goal has pushed me to read books by authors I’ve heard about before, like Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death, as well as new titles by authors I’m not familiar with, like Sofia Quintero’s Show and Prove. I’ve been reading a few more adult books than normal, completing Pulitzer winner All the Light We Cannot See in addition to speculative fiction A Darker Shade of Magic and The Just City. The two favorite titles I’m going to talk about this month, however, are both picture books, due out later in the summer and fall by Caldecott medalists Kevin Henkes and Erin Stead.

Waiting, by Kevin Henkes, uses a cheerful pastel palette to introduce the reader to a series of toys sitting on the windowsill. This book pushes all of my puppeteer, I-like-making-objects-talk buttons and hearkens back to many of my childhood favorites about what dolls and other toys think about when humans aren’t in the room. It’s a quiet book, a thoughtful book, a book that rewards careful re-reading of the pictures and not just the words. I fell in love immediately, and I think you will too.

Lenny and Lucy, by Philip Stead with pictures by Erin Stead, is the first new book from this champion team in three years and it is well worth the wait. That said, it was NOTHING like what I was expecting. I had seen the cover on Twitter, of a boy and a dog and so I assumed the dog Lucy and the boy was Lenny and this was a friendship story. Not so. Lenny and Lucy are neither the boy nor the dog and the story is one of home and fears and changes. It is also about the power of imagination and our ability to create. The pictures are stunning and I know this is going to be a new favorite for many, many people. I can hardly wait to share it!